You've got to take your hat off to the arty indie-pop band, The Sea and Cake, which comes to the Blind Pig on Friday for its first Ann Arbor show. The Chicago-based group manages to create music that is at once both intricate and minimalist - a pretty neat trick.

Given that kind of creative achievement, it probably will not surprise that three of the members - guitarists Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt and bassist Eric Claridge - are art-school grads. And they continue to paint and pursue other visual-arts endeavors.

Prekop likes to say that he and Prewitt are "not very proficient" on their guitars. What he means in this case is that they don't have the technical musical training that would enable them to run through all of the scales with blazing speed. But they create a tightly woven, sympathetic guitar interweave that is full of nimble turnarounds - and sometimes finds them navigating a tricky cat's cradle of chord changes or rhythmic shifts.

The group's avant-pop sound also draws subtly on Latin, soul and Afro-pop influences - the latter of which can often be heard in the hypnotic, circular guitar patterns. And of course, as minimalists, the band members are also inspired by the Velvet Underground, Prekop says in a phone interview from his home in Chicago.

"I think of what we do as being something that we sort of found by accident," he says. "I didn't really plan on becoming a working musician - I went to art school to make art, not rock. But when I first called Archer (in 1993) about starting a band, I felt that our aesthetics would link up in an interesting way - and we just clicked.

"When we create that guitar weave, there is definitely a minimalism, because we're often repeating the same chords or notes, but I think that sets up a bed for other things to happen, on that 'micro' scale that we like," he adds.

"When we're writing songs, I usually come up with the gist of the idea - the kernel of it, the chord change - and then Archer intuitively reacts to it, and we just develop the parts from there."

Another factor in the group's subtly tricky, ear-pleasing sound is that drummer John McEntire possesses the technical prowess that Prekop claims to lack. McEntire has steeped himself in "a lot of new music - he's the one who turned us on to Kraftwerk, and most of our more avant-garde ideas definitely come from him," Prekop says. McEntire also drums for the art-rock band Tortoise.

Claridge is also a very melodic bass player, so at times, he almost functions as a third guitarist, adding more depth and texture to the sound.

For The Sea and Cake's most recent album, "Car Alarm," released in October, the group took a different approach. They came back from tour and instead of retreating to their separate corners for a while - which is their usual habit - they immediately set about the task of writing new songs and recording "Car Alarm."

"We were excited about how we were playing live, and we wanted to record something while we still felt like a regular working band," Prekop explains. "On that tour, we had stripped things down to a four-piece, and we weren't using the keyboards and programmed stuff we had used on past tours. I think that helped us play more in 'the moment.'

"Sometimes, given the guitar sound that Archer and I create, there isn't much sonic room for the keyboard - but a lot of the time it's a pretty important part of our palette."